User:Philippe (WMF)/VisualEditor change management

More information pertaining to this may be available on the talk page. Community members are welcome to comment and give suggestions on the talk page, please - I'll follow it as closely as I can given time constraints, but this is very much a document that I'm authoring and will accordingly take responsibility for. I would ~love~ community suggestions as I do that, but can't promise that this will be a consensus product. Philippe (WMF) (talk) 11:09, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

It will help prevent community rejection of the tool through three mechanisms:

Escalation paths in critical languages;

Engagement in native languages, as much as possible; and

Communications - Regular and frequent, appropriate for the level of engagement.

It will create a repeatable infrastructure for future deployments with a focus on reusability:

Reusability - Community Liaisons (CLs) and Community Advocates (CAs) will be capturing usernames of consistently helpful people and encouraging them to sign up for the Wikitech-ambassadors list and the translators list

It will augment existing community resources with staff resources as needed, but always respect the role of the community while recognizing that, sometimes, the community needs to be prodded to change.

This strategy will overlay on top of existing plans and deployment dates (pre-set) within Engineering. It goes without saying that a critical success factor here is the ability of James F. and Philippe to work closely together on this project. As a result, Philippe will be reporting to James F. In addition, given tight timetables and the need for flexible and efficient execution, Philippe must oversee and manage our other community-facing team members assigned to this project through a dotted reporting relationship.

It’s important to say that - while I strongly believe that this strategy will achieve those three goals, it’s not a “slam-dunk”. No program of this size and nature is without risk. Significant risk factors include a delay in starting; insufficient resourcing, time spent on internal politics because of hazy reporting structure, and outside influences. However, I believe that this strategy, if faithfully executed, will have the best chance of delivering the success factors.

Characteristics of a light engagement include wiki-tech ambassadors who may occasionally drop by, regular bot-delivered notes, and a local feedback page which is routinely scraped by a bot to gather feedback which may or may not be quickly answered on that page. We will track and gather the names of those who step up to help out with these wikis, for future project use.

Characteristics of a medium engagement include a volunteer who commits to an "above and beyond" effort in supporting the deployment, occasional check-ins from senior staff to users (with frequent check-ins between the volunteer language advocate and senior staff), and a local feedback page where the volunteer language advocate will attempt to answer questions in native language, escalating where she is uncertain of the answer. Wikis in this category are designated as “high priority” wikis for us, and the category will be locked down prior to engagement, so as to prevent us adding more languages to this group, and to also assure that they are all roughly in the same “place” in the socialization plan (without having one start three weeks later than others because we just had a volunteer present themselves, etc). We will track and gather the names of those who step up to help out with these wikis, for future project use.

Characteristics of a full engagement include a staff member assigned to watch the wiki and serve as an information conduit, frequent check-ins from staff to users, and a local feedback page where feedback left is synthesized and responded to fairly rapidly. We will track and gather the names of those who step up to help out with these wikis, for future project use. Tentative list of full engagement wikis (with responsible staff member):

Philippe (or, if non-LCA, to their own manager with a dotted line to Philippe)

own the transactional work of preparing their assigned wikis for deployment with a deep engagement, including establishing and monitoring feedback loops

Community Liaisons

Erica, Keegan, Sherry, Patrick

James / Howie, with a dotted line to Philippe

own the transactional work of operating broad focused communications methods, such as EdwardsBot, assuring for watchlist notices and centralnotice, etc. They will not be deployed to particular wikis, but will monitor large numbers of them.

Volunteer Language Community Advocates

TBD

Philippe

the principal point of contact for their wikis, and will have agreed to an "above and beyond" type of role.

Engineering Community Management

Sumana

RobLa / Messages to be signed off on by Philippe

Work with the CLs to see that they have access to the people and tools needed; management of wikitech-ambassadors communications (after getting “go” from Philippe)

Broadcasting (owned primarily by CLs, with CA support)- using tools such as EdwardsBot, watchlist notice, centralnotice, sitenotice, talk page messages to influential community members, concise and well written and translated FAQs and announcements, IRC chats. Documentation will be published in at least English and German, but preferably as many languages as possible (a practical compromise may be our tier 3 languages - English, German, Spanish, and French). The structure of the documents will lend itself toward ease of translation and prioritisation (e.g., first paragraph always a summary paragraph) and will use existing tools as much as possible, supplemented and augmented by professional translation resources where necessary for reasons of speed or quality.